Pinterest Reveals Workforce (Lack Of) Diversity Numbers

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Pinterest on Thursday became the latest tech firm to reveal the gender and ethnicity breakdown among its staff. With a workforce that skews broadly male and white or Asian, the social sharing site is in pretty much the same boat as several much larger Silicon Valley companies which have pledged to add more diversity in recent weeks.

"Today we're taking our latest step by giving a more holistic look at our demographics across the company. We're not close to where we want to be, but we're working on it," Pinterest software engineer and tech lead Tracy Chou wrote in a blog post.

Pinterest's 300-strong workforce is 60 percent male and 40 percent female, the company revealed. That's roughly in line with the gender ratio at Yahoo, a much larger company with about 12,000 employees which reported its own workforce demographic numbers last month.

But having a somewhat more balanced workforce along gender lines than many of its larger peers may not provide much satisfaction for Pinterest users, who are nearly 70 percent women.

Meanwhile, if San Francisco-based Pinterest has more gender diversity than most, its workforce is just about as ethnically mixed as those of Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Twitter, which is to say, not very.

Pinterest reported that 50 percent of its employees are white and 42 percent are Asian, while African-Americans make up just 1 percent of staffers and Hispanics just 2 percent. The company classified 5 percent of its workforce as "Other."

Like other tech firms which have recently reported their internal demographics, Pinterest pledged to diversify its workforce going forward. Chou said the company is doing so by working with groups like Girls Who Code, CODE2040, Girls Teaching Girls to Code, Anita Borg Institute, Hackbright Academy, and Out for Undergrad.

She also said Pinterest has had some concrete success with getting more women on staff in the past couple of years.

"As we look ahead, we've put particular effort on inclusion efforts in hiring earlier in the engineering pipeline, recruiting a 29 percent female inaugural engineering intern class last year and 32 percent female this year. Beyond hiring, we're mindful of processes and practices that may affect success and retention of employees coming from less represented backgrounds," she said.

But Chou didn't have similar numbers to share about Pinterest's effort to become a more ethnically diverse company

"While we've made some progress in diversifying gender at the company, we haven't done as well in representing different ethnicities, and we're focused on getting better," she said.

Damon Poeter got his start in journalism working for the English-language daily newspaper The Nation in Bangkok, Thailand. He covered everything from local news to sports and entertainment before settling on technology in the mid-2000s. Prior to joining PCMag, Damon worked at CRN and the Gilroy Dispatch. He has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle and Japan Times, among other newspapers and periodicals.
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